Posts tagged with: rte

Several months ago (ugh, time flies) I posted a screencast demo'ing a semantic HTML editor. Back then I used a combination of client-side and server-side components, which I have to admit led to quite a number of unnecessary server round-trips.

In the meantime, others have shown that powerful client-side editors can be implemented on top of HTML5, and so I've now rewritten the whole thing and turned it into a pure JavaScript tool as well. It now supports inline WYSIWYG editing and HTML5 Microdata annotations.

The code is still at beta stage, but today I put up an early demo website which I'll use as a sandbox. The editor is called Swipe (like the dance move, but it's an acronym, too). What makes Swipe special is its ability to detect the caret coordinates even when the cursor is inside a text node, which is usually not possible with W3C range objects. This little difference enables several new possibilities, like precise in-place annotations or "linked-data-as-you-type" functionality for user-friendly entity suggestions. More to come soon...

A screencast demonstrating the structured RTE bundled with the Trice CMS

In my previous post I mentioned that I'm building a Linked Data CMS. One of its components is a rich-text editor that allows the creation (and embedding) of structured markup.

An earlier version supported limited Microdata annotations, but now I've switched the mechanism and use an intermediate, but even simpler approach based on HTML5's handy data-* attributes. This lets you build almost arbitrary markup with the editor, including Microformats, Microdata, or RDFa. I don't know yet when the CMS will be publicly available (3 sites are under development right now), but as mentioned, I'd be happy about another pilot project or two. Below is a video demonstrating the editor and its easy customization options.